In 1982, the National Institute of Health announced that no link between sugar and hyperactivity had been scientifically proven. Why, then, does this myth still persist? It may be mostly psychological. As previously stated, experimentation has shown that parents who believe in a link between sugar and hyperactivity see one, even though others do not. Another possibility is that children tend to be more excited at events like birthday and Halloween parties where sugary foods are usually served . People may have confused proximity with correlation although the environment is probably more to blame than the food.

The notion of a "sugar high" was a propaganda technique [dukehealth.org] used to manipulate the masses into reducing their sugar consumption during WW2. It doesn't exist. Kids that get hyperactive after consuming sugar do so because they have been trained by an adult into thinking they can act up with impunity because the "sugar" makes them do it.

I found that even diet drinks make me unable to concentrate after a few days of regular consumption. As an experiment I switched from diet cola colored drinks to a diet clear drink that had even more caffeine. The problem went away. Whatever the chemical is, chai tea (diffuser in water, not the starbucks crap) does the same thing to me after a few days, while black and green tea do not.

I like the rishi 100% masala chai, which is as you say, just spices and tea. I don't know which spice does it, but it is consistent. The tazo bags do it to, but they have essential oils of some spices rather than the dried spice.

So, my two-year-old niece, who is normally a delight, only gets atypically pissy, stubborn and reckless when she's consumed sugar in excess because she possesses the cognizance to know she can excuse it based on supposedly false psychological conceptions?

Sure, OK, I guess I should tell my sister that her daughter is some sort of prodigy.

So, my two-year-old niece, who is normally a delight, only gets atypically pissy, stubborn and reckless when she's consumed sugar in excess because she possesses the cognizance to know she can excuse it based on supposedly false psychological conceptions?

She eats pure sugar? Or maybe she eats foods (probably processed ones) which contain a lot of sugar, but also lots of other ingredients, some of which may cause that behaviour?

I was never told anything about "sugar rushes" but on odd occasions with particular food i get them. Followed by a crash about 20-40min later. The worst was maple syrup on a maple butter dessert in Canada. To claim that sugar consumption doesn't affect blood sugar levels is disingenuous at best. Ask a diabetic what they get when they are low/high.

Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.

(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)

However the scientific literature in this case is a crock of shit. Those studies were based upon calorie controlled meals ie take a full days calories appropriate for the test subject and divide that into say five calorie meals.
Now supply the individual with exactly the calorie limit for that single meal in a high sugar ratio and not one calorie more and seriously is any one going to sugar high. Reality here, those studies are junk science funded by sugar industry Public relations Arse holes.

Actually, I don't know that. There was at least one study a few years ago that studied just that. It discovered that there was no difference in children's behavior after consuming a large dose of sugar. The researchers postulated that the myth about sugar resulting in kid's "bouncing off the walls", resulted from the fact that kids tend to consume large amounts of sugar in settings which cause them to be more active.

However, anecdotal observations of this kind need to be tested scientifically before conclusions can be drawn, and criteria for interpreting diet behavior studies must be rigorous.... Although sugar is widely believed by the public to cause hyperactive behavior, this has not been scientifically substantiated. Twelve double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of sugar challenges failed to provide any evidence that sugar ingestion leads to untoward behavior in children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or in normal children.

So you are quoting a study that thinks there is such a thing as a normal child? You did know that government agencies aren't automagically authoritative in the scientific community, right? In other news, smoking a single joint is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes and food categories can be neatly organized into four groups that just happen to overlap with food industry categories that lobby the government, and it is best to purchase... er I mean consume equal quantities from each group.

In the study in question "normal children" was used over and against "children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder", not as a distinct category, rather as a category of children without Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (which for the purposes of this particular study qualified as "normal").
Also, perhaps you missed the fact that the paper referenced sourced twelve double-blind studies (double-blind studies being considered among the most reliable of all studies). Do you perhaps have acces

I have done that. When I consume large quantities of sugar, I become sleepy, NOT hyperactive. So, both my personal experience AND a study I have seen supports the conclusion that sugar does not make children hyperactive.

Cinnamon actually slows the body's uptake of sugar. We put it in cake icing and it keeps down that sugar rush us old fogies can't quite handle any more.

For my kids we won't let 'em have sugar deserts after supper and they are MUCH more well behaved getting to bed. I'm not sure they are any less "bouncing off the walls" but they do go to sleep much easier.

A) They took some kids to a party, let the parents see tables full of cake but secretly fed the kids raw tofu beans (or something like that). After dinner they made made the kids jump around to loud music for half an hour. On the way home all the parents swore the kids were hyperactive and it was all down to the sugar.

B) The took some 'problem' kids to a party and showed the parents tables full of raw tofu beans. When the parents left they fed the kids to bursting with chocolate cake, soda, anything with lots of sugar. After that they sat the kids down quietly and read them a bedtime story. The kids were falling asleep in their parent's cars on the way home. The parents put it all down to the tofu and swore to never feed their kids on sugar ever again.

Conclusion: The "sugar" thing is 100% confirmation bias by the parents.

There's a TV program on it somewhere - it's called "The Truth About Food" or something like that (it was one of a series made by the BBC).

A study following the examples you gave would most certainly not show the "sugar" thing to be 100% confirmation bias. It would show that at best there is enough confirmation bias that taking most parents word for it is useless.

Of course, using an alternate method of making the kids hyper also invalidates the study. If you fed a room full of people decaf coffee, telling them that it was caffeinated, but slipped them meth without telling them, it wouldn't prove that caffeine doesn't make many people jitt

Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children,
may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior.

I agree with you. This study doesn't prove anything and is complete failure. It doesn't deserve to make its way on/. unless it is to discuss how bad studies can lead media to make false conclusions from thin data and no clue.

Which I felt I pointed out here, that we have this survey, sampling thousands of mothers (no fathers), about the behavior and consumption habits of their 5-year-olds (not 1 or 7-year-olds) and asks questions with the word "baby's father" in them about abusive partners. It is supposedly a survey about soda consumption in young children that satisfies hardly anything about the type of soda, which when we consider aspartame let's say, has elsewhere been related to irritability and making people feel shitty.
R

Yeah, that was odd that they didn't have ANY data on what kind of soda it was-- one would at least want to know if it was caffeinated or not. (The authors sort of apologize for this in their discussion).

On the other hand, really *detailed* information about the kind of soda wouldn't have been useful, largely for statistical reasons. There's a fair amount of literature on the relationship between artificial colors/flavors/preservatives and ADHD. And if you look at that literature, they tend to lump all of

I agree with you. This study doesn't prove anything and is complete failure. It doesn't deserve to make its way on/. unless it is to discuss how bad studies can lead media to make false conclusions from thin data and no clue.

OK, let's be honest now: did you actually read the effing article? Or just the summary?

If the answer is "yes" to question #1, please be good enough to explain how you would change the study design to make it better.

It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.

Agreed. Bad parenting is an obvious confounder. The other obvious confounder is low socio-economic status. (Picture a devoted-but-overwhelmed mother who is raising her kid in a food desert, with limited income, bad schools, high crime rates, and no support from Dad... and who is perhaps not too well educated about healthy food choices to begin with).

So let's look at the article: The authors made a valiant attempt to statistically correct for factors like this. They looked at a long list of confounders (

It could be the soda, though sugary foods have previously been studied in aggregate without finding any significant effect on children.

My suspicion? Bad parenting. Parents which don't care, which are handing their kids soda and an iPad instead of doing their jobs. Then the kids' behavior grows increasingly worse as they act out, attempting to draw the attention they need. In this case two sodas per meal (nobody drinks soda for breakfast) is a proxy that should be screaming "these are really bad parents."

So sugar doesn't affect the kids. Maybe it is carbonation. American beer has loads of carbonation and causes anger issues. European beer has less carbonation (and more flavour) causes less anger issues.

Please tell my wife that. She pops a can of Pepsi right after dressing in the morning. It makes my stomach churn a little watching her. (I don't drink sodas at all (green tea is my morning beverage), and can't even imagine having one first thing in the morning.) She says it's caffeine and sugar in an easily handled container -- the perfect food. Gag.

Wife and daughter together average four to six cases a month. It's a chore to get them to police their cans, and wh

Confusingly, in the title and elsewhere, the word 'soda' is used. A soft drink isn't necessarily a soda/carbonated/fizzy drink. In other words, a soft drink may be non-fizzy. That makes the summary at least somewhat ambiguous.

If you look at the linked pdf, you discover that they used the term "soft drink" in the title of the paper, but then make it clear later in the paper that they studied sodas. The fact of the matter is that in most usage, "soft drink" and "soda" are synonyms. The problem is that both words are somewhat ambiguous. "Soft drink" originally meant any non-alcoholic drink (probably excepting milk and water, but I am not sure on that as I was not alive when this usage was common). "Soda" (as a reference to a bevera

Some areas use the term "soft drink" or "cold drink" to describe what any sensible person would refer to as a "coke". Because these beverages bubbliness has nothing to do with any alkaline with sodium in it, I would argue that soda is no more appropriate than those three terms or "pop". Carbonated drink, or fizzy drink both seem quite reasonable.

coke. noun -1) a rocky carbon-rich fuel used in high-temperature furnaces such as for iron-working2) slang for cocaine3) a trademarked line of carbonated beverages produced by the Coca-Cola corporation

Only (3) is at all relevant to the discussion, and you'd better believe you'd be inviting no end of trouble if you use it in a generic fashion, especially if you're using it in a potential criticism of the consumption of such beverages.

Certainly the "carnonated/fizzy drink" might be accurate, but would also ap

Oh it's common here too. But it's still a trademarked name, and hence using it in any formal capacity is asking for trouble. Can you imagine the headlines "Coke consumption increases violence in children!" How long do you suppose it would be before the lawsuits started to fly?

The problem with the survey can be found in the results section of the Abstract. They oversampled males by +4, and 51% of the families were Black. This isn't a soda/soft drink issue; it's a parenting/cultural issue, which is mentioned, but essentially glossed over when you start delving into the "study". The families were already "in the system", as they were part of an ongoing study, which tells me that there were already parenting and cultural issues that go deeper than the family's diet.

Political Correctness implicitly states that culture and race are the same thing. Of course, that's not really true, but the cowardly among PC types still stands stedfast to conflate the two. So, if you mention black culture, you will be chastised as a racist!

PC types conflate culture and race. I for one do not. Culture and race are two entirely separate things. I was just illustrating that when you speak of black culture, there are assholes out there that derive power by stifling decent via dropping the "race card". Specifically the PC types.

"We have no information on what type of soft drinks were consumed, particularly whether they were regular or diet, sugar-sweetened or artificially sweetened, cola or noncola, and caffeinated or noncaffeinated,"

Seriously? You have a bunch of factors which might be relevant, and you don't even fscking MEASURE them?

(OK, "worst study ever" might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's pretty bad as studies that don't smack of Mengele go)

(OK, "worst study ever" might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's pretty bad as studies that don't smack of Mengele go)

Do you have any information about the scientific quality of Mengele's studies? Of course his studies were highly immoral, but since there's no sign for any immorality in the study this article is about, that's irrelevant for your comparison.

When the US military tested PCP on volunteers in 1984, "some subjects became irritable, argumentative or negative under the conditions of social stress and demanding tasks." Now, a study published by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Vermont have found not-so-different results in children that do too much Dew.

So soda is just as bad as PCP? Certainly not. Such hyperbole is reason alone not to read any further.

I have an alternative theory: Parents who let their children drink soda have less self-control and discipline, and so do their children. Isn't that much more likely than the proposition that soda has the same side-effects as PCP? But that won't get hits.

who drink soda 4 times or more per day is that they are able to do so because of a lack of parental supervision (plus a few because of extreme dental ignorance on the part of the parents). I think that that same lack of supervision leads to bad behavior in little kids. I don't think I'd blame the soda for bad behavior, though caffeine may be contributing to the problem.

I've been a heavy drinker for 50 years. I never went around attacking people or getting into arguments or randomly destroying shit just for kicks.

I enjoy a few liters of diet coke every day. When I was younger, I drank a few 12-16 oz bottles of sugared pepsi, root beer, ginger ale, or cream soda just about ever day. Maybe a couple more in the summer time.

IMHO, they're just poking at shit to see what the gullible will accept so that they can wring out some grant money from politicians pandering to their mind

Nearly all sodas contain caffeine. Caffeine, like most psychoactive drugs, has effects proportional to body weight.

A can of coke has about 40 mg of caffeine. For standard 180 lb adult, that gives you a nice little wake-me-up. But put that much drug in a 40lb kid, and you'll see the effects similar to a healthy adult slamming back 2 cans of Red Bull.

Couple that with the lack of self-control of kids, and it's no wonder they're bouncing off the walls.

Sugar in the doses you find in coke and pepsi is like a stimulant, in many regards, giving a pronounced sugar rush to those more sensitive to sugar. This effect changes your behaviour unless you learn to counterbalance the effects it has on you. It is the same with anything stimulating. When it comes to things with the opposite effect, one needs to be aware of how their ability to control things can be inhibited so that lower levels of stimulation can then trigger greater responses not due to th

In a related study, it was found that 97% of mass murderers had consumed bread within 24 hours of having committed their rampage.

Actually - and this is significant - all of them had been inhaling Oxygen in a somewhat diluted form through the process known as breathing. There's no question that there is a connection as it is also a fact that people that don't breathe don't murder anyone, let alone more than one. We have to ban Oxygen and forbid all forms of breathing. That will solve all problems with mass murders - guaranteed.

I ran another study and found that approximately 50% of the same respondents are male, the other 50% female, and 100% breathe oxygen on a regular basis. Therefore, I can only conclude that having a gender and breathing oxygen must make 5 year olds destructive, violent, sociopaths.

A bigger problem with the study is that it is based on a survey of mothers. The study could have instead found: (1) mothers who give their kids soda are for some reason more sensitive to bad behavior, (2) mothers "know" that soda causes bad behavior and so they expect it and report their bias, (3) some third factor affects both soda drinking as well as actual or perceived behavior, (4) almost an infinite number of other things.

I'm glad that someone is examining this, but a study like this can only be used to point science in a direction - it by no means implicates soda as a behavior modifier all by itself, all it found was a correlation in a self-reported survey.

One option would be that mothers who allow their kids the have so much sugar in their diet is failing in probably more ways than one. So not only is the child getting improper nutrition but also not being taught how to act & respect people or things

One option would be that mothers who allow their kids the have so much sugar in their diet is failing in probably more ways than one. So not only is the child getting improper nutrition but also not being taught how to act & respect people or things

The authors agree with you:

Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children, may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior. In stressful home environments, for example, a child’s needs are likely to be unmet and unhealthy behavioral practices may be more prevalent. An extensive literature has documented a relationship between stressful home environments and child behavior. For example, children who are victims of violent acts or who witness violence have been found to have more externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, more aggression problems and to show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder [9-11]. Furthermore, caretaker mental health can be a strong contributor to both behavioral and developmental problems in children through its effects, in part, on parenting quality and overall home environment [12]. Children of depressed mothers have been shown to develop more social and emotional problems during childhood, including higher internalizing and externalizing problems [13]. Thus, it is possible that observed associations between behavior and soda consumption among adolescents can be attributed to unadjusted social risk factors.

Maybe people who allow their children to drink 4 or more sodas a day are simply bad parents who do not teach their children any discipline or self control.

There is something to this, but when one of the parents is also addicted to the stuff, the other parent doesn't have a lot of options that don't tear the family apart. (Speaking from experience.) We're not talking "clean up your room" here. Consuming sodas can become a real addiction.